Said, I think, would have appreciated John King’s extraordinary suite for string quartet, Free Palestine, recently released on New World Records, and not only because King has dedicated it to the same cause that Said served as an unofficial spokesman. Seldom have the traditions of Western and Arabic music been fused with such intelligence, integrity, and feeling. King, an experimental New York composer born in 1953, discovered Arabic music late in life, but he has more than made up for lost time in his study of the maqam’at (melodic modes) and iqa’at (rhythmic units), the building blocks of the improvisatory form known as taqsim. Yet Free Palestine wears its diligence lightly. Although rigorous in its exploration of Arabic music, it is also playful, relaxed, and joyous, the work of a mature composer who has replenished himself thanks to a love affair with a new form. The freedom King’s title invokes has as much to do with the liberation of sound as it does with the liberation of Palestine.
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Rarely on our stages do we hear such joyful music filled with calm yet energetic life force. The work has an arc which emerges from silence and after drawing a spiral returns to stillness. Right at the beginning we hear timbral signals of Buddhist ritual instruments: the large horns, pipes, bells, prayer wheels and bowls. The narrative and meaning of this work overlap in a slow and steady movement towards a peak through gradually increased complexity, accelerated tempo, increased dynamic levels and harmonies pleasant to the ear. With all sharp angles removed the music overflows and spills into waves of excitement, sounding complex but not complicated, orchestrated expertly with much finesse and delicacy. "10,000 Things" spirals out from emptiness, through a steadily growing power, stopping at an expressive climatic point, followed by a joyful letting go and serenely entering into silence, perhaps the silence nirvana brings.

Especially in choreographer Kevin O’Day’s driving, dreamlike closer, this was an artist making full use of the company, with his long-time collaborator, New York composer John King, also exploring the bounds of every musician of the Turning Point Ensemble for this commission. King’s time-vectors/still-points worked with blasts from the orchestra becoming oh-so-gradually more frequent, the music in between inhabited by clucking strings and fluttering harps, woodwinds, and percussion. Bodies rushed on- and off-stage, a whirl of duos turning into trios turning into quartets turning into duos. Its biggest appeal was its deliriumlike feel, with dancers sometimes running backward as if they were being pulled by an invisible force. Strong, strange images included Meyer, her body stiff and horizontal, being passed between partners, or Alexis Fletcher being hoisted high, her legs running in the air. When you weren’t marvelling at the complex, brain-teasing games of rhythm in the score, you were taking in a blizzard of movement on the dim stage. Call it a full-on experience for both sides of the brain—and maybe even some corners of that grey matter that you didn’t even know existed.

“The Brooklyn Youth Chorus filed into the balcony and launched into an ethereal performance of John King’s Light. The theater was completely dark, but the music lived up to its title. The teens’ and children’s voices, directed by BYC founder Dianne Berkun-Menaker, glowed across each other from one side of the stage to the other. The two groups of voices were like clouds merging from dissonance to consonance so silkily that it was impossible to tell just when the discordance dissolved. The voices spiralled and zigzagged over and under one another and permeated the air above our heads. It was hard to believe the performers producing this difficult, mature-sounding music were so young.”

"Led by director Dianne Berkun-Menaker, the choir’s first selection kicked off the night with an ethereal, otherworldly sound. “Light” by John King was a soup of dissonance and complex harmonies, crashing into each other and bouncing off the walls. The young choir’s high quality of training and professionalism was immediately apparent, and they would prove to live up to the many accolades given to them in their 21 seasons."

Less well known as a name but no less important to the mix here is the veteran downtown eminence John King: a composer equally at home writing for a rock-tinged ensemble or a string quartet. His Prima Volta, a notated piece that also makes use of computer-aided chance processes, adds a pleasingly discordant, electronic texture that the album needs.

"John King’s Hammerbone for two trombones and electronics was likewise impressive for its level of interaction, both between the two performers and the electronics. At times this involved slides into dissonance between the two trombones, and at other times one trombone would settle into a simple groove while the other burst into soloistic passages. The electronics flowed out of the performance, filling in the music, building new timbres from the live instruments, and echoing the trombone lines. The more consonant moments verged on some combination of minimalism and modern jazz without ever quite going there. The low rumbles and resonance created between the two trombones and electronics were full of sonorous gravitas. Jen Baker and Chris McIntyre moved through the expansive and virtuosic material with great control and a feeling of spontaneity."

"John King’s powerful “AllSteel” is a response to rather than an illustration of 9/11. Four of its movements — muscular and driving and energized — were begun on Sept. 10, 2001. After Sept. 11, King reconceived the piece by answering each with a quiet meditation, harmonics such as smoke drifting up from the ruins. The result amounts to two antiphonally interleaving quartets, crystallizing around a cadenza-like passage for solo violin in which Jennifer Choi tried to fiddle her way out of solitude as the other players began to chime in, then again fell silent."

At the start, with wonderful polyphony, brass players, one located on each of the topmost balconies on four sides, play long notes that mesh wonderfully with recorded high choral sounds (like a Kyrie in a modernist requiem Mass).

"Chance and improvisation are the primary forces driving composer/violist/guitarist John King’s 3rd CD of riveting, inventive string quartets. Performed by his quartet, Crucible, comprised of King on viola, Cornelius Dufallo and Mark Feldman on violin, and Alex Waterman on cello, the three works on this disc employ what King refers to as “trilogic unity,” in which “predetermined (composed), spontaneous (improvised) and indeterminate (randomized) music… are incorporated into the work equally.” The result is a set of compositions that are all very different from one another, and that share a surprisingly organic sense of flow and structure..."

“In his second recording of music for string quartet to appear on Tzadik, violist John King explores the three-way intersection between composition, indeterminacy and improvisation. “10 Mysteries,” the disc’s primary material, is an extended work in nine movements. In addition to traditionally notated music, King has included his own notation system, which prescribes simple actions such as “drone” or “silence” or more directional transformations like “expand” or “distill.” It is up to the performer to translate these instructions into music. The order and placement of these notations was determined through consulting the I-Ching, bringing yet another form of indeterminacy to the compositional process. The work becomes further indeterminate, as the player determines the duration of each semi-improvisational section.”

Opera traditionally requires highly organized and tightly machined collaborations of facets and artists. It’s a different story entirely, however, with “Dice Thrown”, John King’s provocative new opera given its world premiere over the weekend. What transpired on Friday night was innately different from Saturday’s brainchild, thanks to the embrace of computer-generated chance – digital “dice-throwing.” King commandeers a blend of chamber ensemble, dance and vocalists who intone lines from Stephane Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’abolira le Hasard/Dice Thrown Never will Annul Chance.” With “Dice Thrown”, elements of musical theater are in place, but the rules of the opera game are thrown into happy disarray.

“John King’s Dice Thrown, a fantasia on a grand and intoxicating late poem by Mallarmé, was more like a revelation. Mr. King is an esteemed downtown veteran who has composed two scores for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; like Mr. Cunningham’s partner, John Cage, he composes using chance operations, creating music that eschews any resemblance to traditional tonality or syntax.
And yet, in a performance by the stunningly accurate soprano Melissa Fogarty, the piece became a dazzling coloratura solo of compelling dramatic urgency. The soprano and the orchestral players (conducted ably by Marc Lowenstein) have considerable freedom in interpreting the “materials” of Mr. King’s fragmentary score: Each performance makes for a unique, unrepeatable composition.
Nothing’s easier than to write bad music this way—and as the second of two 15-minute versions began its run, I was not hopeful.
But about five minutes in, wonderful things started happening. The English horn player intoned his phrases with an ear-catching lyrical arc; the strings responded in kind, and Ms. Fogarty started creating a character, not just a “part.” A musical country you could call Mallarmé Land cohered into being: We could picture its mountains, its cities, its fretting housewives, its squabbling politicians.
Perhaps it’s the listener, ultimately, who breathes life into Mr. King’s piece, or pieces. But it’s the composer’s invention that makes that possible, and Mr. King’s is of a rare kind.”

"Another recent Ethel disc, “AllSteel,” issued on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, is devoted exclusively to works by John King, an electric guitarist and the former curator of music programming at the Kitchen.
The most substantial piece is the one that lends the disc its title. Mr. King sketched four movements of “AllSteel” on Sept. 10, 2001, then added another four in response to the tumultuous events of the next day. The movements composed before the tragedy are energetic, jazzy and occasionally abrasive in their high spirits; those that followed move from numbed anguish to quiet resilience and hope.
“Round Sunrise” is in two movements, a relaxed blues and a bustling conclusion based on a persistent riff. Both sections require extensive improvisation. The Ethel players respond with serpentine lines and greasy slurs. Similar qualities characterize “Lightning Slide,” which Mr. King composed for Kronos. Insistently chugging rhythms in the opening and closing movements suggest the momentum of a runaway locomotive. Happily, Ethel keeps eight firm hands on the wheel."

"Right up front, written in the program, composer/creator John King proposes a half-dozen different scenarios for his electronic opera, "La Belle Captive" (you get to decide on the most likely candidate). Then he quotes Alain Robbe-Grillet. If this doesn't provoke in you feelings of placid certainty, you're not alone. But what follows is hypnotic, intellectually substantial, and slightly chilling - if never quite comprehensible.
Mr. King’s multimedia cornucopia, with video and sound mixed live, delights in proposing a dozen narrative nodes that collide and compete with each other. Using bits of Robbe-Grillet’s writing, he spins a sort of multidimensional, postmodern mystery story, in which young women are abducted, tarot cards are examined, and foreign objects suddenly appear in static paintings. It's a bit like having a dream after hearing a fragment of Paul Auster broadcast on a broken television set. A young woman (Analia Couceyro) can just be seen through a portal of scrim, on which is projected yellow and orange static, images of a city, and a giant eye. Her voice, lightly accented, describes for us an unseen picture in staggering detail. The painting, which occasionally resembles what we see through the screen, is of a cell with women trapped inside. As the voice of our narrator weaves its way in and out of Spanish and through various identities, we worry she herself might be some sort of inmate. Another woman (Carla Filipcic Holm), dressed in a toga, sings fragments of songs in Spanish, and provides the lonely woman with an imaginary friend.
Describing the production has the unfortunate result of making it all sound like chaos. But Mr. King, video designer Benton-C Bainbridge, and set designer Minou Maguna have created a well-delineated world that churns up the same disturbing images again and again. Only a few chosen items make up this strange little universe, and the piece obsesses over them until our minds are forced to order them into sense. The spell of the piece never breaks. It's a sturdy sort of magic that Mr. King creates, and it's a pleasure to succumb to it."

"Most impressive was John King's "All Steel," a meaty composition full of buoyant energy. The composer, a violinist and guitarist, hit a target that many fall short of: Each of the eight or so connected movements had a distinctive character or groove, with much rhythmic invention and interesting harmonic wanderings, often the result of gently sliding counterpoint. While there was nothing that screamed "I'm trying to sound like rock music," the work was utterly contemporary and street-smart, and offered fine, idiomatic writing for strings.”

"On last Thursday night's opening program was the world premiere of John King's "AllSteel", an eight-movement work that touched on an extraordinarily wide range of styles. Movements were often driven by rhythmic figures that, in different instrumental shades, could propel a rock jam, but there was also a movement with an extended cello solo, played pizzicato and with sliding notes in the style of a jazz bass. Between the more outgoing movements were quiet if not entirely serene interludes.”

“They concluded with ‘Spiritual,' a foray into Indian music, and ‘Shuffle,' another John King composition which proves that the authenticity of the Delta blues can be equally as valid on a traditional instrument as it is on slide guitar. Unencumbered by convention, genre or style, these four musicians have a key asset: soul. Long may they explore new possibilities in string quartet performance.”

"The unsuspecting audience was massaged with funk rhythms until we were completely wet. Then we were nailed to the wall with Hendrix-esque guitar solos. In one hour, the trio created a kind of music which made one long for citizenship in King's Electric World."